


Fight and Flight

by Saxifactumterritum



Series: you have to have SOMETHING to keep breathing [1]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-05
Updated: 2019-10-05
Packaged: 2020-11-24 07:04:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20903618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Saxifactumterritum/pseuds/Saxifactumterritum
Summary: set during season one, John needs to breathe. He's building something.





	Fight and Flight

**Author's Note:**

> It isn't McShep, but it is because they are in love, but not quite yet. I was gonna put more. Maybe I'll put more. Hmm

That first long, lonely year on Atlantis, thrown into a command he isn’t qualified for, John needs something, just something that he can pick up for five minutes, that’ll stop the ever-encroaching, always looming menace of his job. Work-life balance is a myth in Pegasus, but if he doesn’t have five minutes once in a while he knows he’s going to burn out. Though, it turns out that while he’s not got the rank or the training for the command, he is actually uniquely qualified in some ways. 

He’s worked on joint operations before a fair amount, so being air force while almost everyone else is marines doesn’t present too many issues; different branches, different protocols, different languages almost. It’s just another sort of cultural difference, he listens and adapts accordingly. Everyone else has got years of training with the SGC behind them, but John’s got a varied and patchy history of flinging himself in the deep end first and learning to swim second. He’s also worked on projects with civilians, doing the classified stuff mostly he was just in charge of flying whatever they gave him but he did work a fair bit with civilian contractors, and half the exfils he ran it wasn’t soldiers he was pulling out. 

He thinks about the ways he was often surprised by the skillsets people had when he makes up gate-teams. He makes sure every team has plenty of military experience, but he knows the value, for example, of someone who can make up the most incredible stories; it keeps children quiet and it keeps men and women from panicking. He remembers crouching in the dark, struggling not to be drawn into the incredible worlds being woven around him in a steady, rhythmic voice, everyone calm and quiet and listening, to keep his focus on his job. He remembers the value, too, of someone who can engineer genius-level shite out of thin air. He’d never known who she was, hadn’t even been allowed to know her nationality, damned if he ever worked out what she put in his fuel tanks, but it got them home. 

In the end, Pegasus is a lot of near-death, a lot of extracting teams from the wackiest situations, and a lot of paperwork. A lot of supplies running short, trying to fill gaps, working out what to ration and what they can afford to use up, what they can get from off-world. A lot of meetings, plenty of arguments with Elizabeth who is far more ruthless than he expects, especially in the search for knowledge. She’ll look after her people and she’s fiercely loyal but her main objective is to learn as much as possible, record it, study everything. She thinks knowledge will save any universe. John will do a lot for good intel, but he thinks it’ll be good people who get things done. Dr McKay calls him naive when he mentions good people, according to McKay everyone is shit, every _ thing  _ is shit, and the only thing that matters is unravelling the mysteries of science. And good food. 

He does his best, answering the radio every hour of night or day, running for the control room or the lab or the infirmary for one emergency or another, shutting himself in with Bates and Elizabeth to argue about security and if it's a waste of resources for Bates to deploy armed guards to stand watch over any native Pegasus people who come visit (it is). He turns things on for the scientists, fosters good relations between military and civilian contingents at Elizabeth’s behest (chess, pool, beer and swimming), and between Earth personnel and Pegasus personnel at his own behest (Pegasus’s answer to chess, Teyla's made up pool-ish, swimming and Pegasus home-brew). He gears up and takes his team out to world after world, looking for Elizabeth’s knowledge, John’s good people, McKay’s answers. And food. He breaks up fights amongst frustrated soldiers on base, runs training, turns a blind eye to an underground fight-club that springs up so long as no one reports for duty too banged up. He tries to secure more lab space for science departments, tries to keep patrol areas within Bates’ perimeters, tries not to scream in terror as they find out more about the wraith. 

He feels like he runs and runs and runs, and who has time to sleep? He feels breathless his entire first two months in Pegasus. He can’t catch his breath, if he’s not in his office doing paperwork he’s in the gym training his people he’s on the mainland he’s out on ops he’s in meetings he’s being pulled in a million directions and he hasn’t got time for anything. After one particularly heated meeting where he can feel Elizabeth gently but firmly negotiating him into a corner he doesn’t want to be in, feeling manipulated and tugged at. He knows when someone’s pulling gently on strings, subtly using what they know about him to guide him to a particular corner where there’s only one way out, which happens to coincide with what they want from him. He doesn’t want to agree to whatever it is, or she’d just ask outright. He begs another meeting and scarpers.

He finds himself in the greenhouses, someone was asking him for a meeting because he’s not been allocating enough recon missions to finding plants or something, something about sustainable food, probably important. He can’t even remember her name, the woman who heads up Botany, he passed it on to Rodney. He’s CSO, Botany is Science. John wanders into her office now, though, and she immediately sends out the people she seems to be having a meeting with and makes him sit down instead. Before he knows it he’s agreed to pop one of her botanists on a team with Lorne to go out looking for seeds or something. He doesn’t begrudge this bit of wheedling, this woman is straight forward even in her machinations, grinning now and then in acknowledgement, insistent but taking into account that he hasn’t actually got a whole lot of resources to put on this. 

“Great, glad that's resolved...um… I’m really sorry, introduce yourself to me again?” John says, getting up. She narrows her eyes, then sighs. 

“Simone Navqui-Roberts” she says, holding out her hand. “Doctor, if we’re using titles. Or sargeant.”

“Ex service?” John asks, shaking her hand. 

“I’m being facetious, I was a police sergeant before I quit, tiny little town in Herefordshire,” she says. “England,” she adds, when he looks a bit blank. “Bobby will do, major, most people call me Bobby. Make a joke about a bobby on the beat and I'll hit you.”

“Most people call me Sheppard. Or major. Shep, sometimes, Boomer was my call-sign years ago,” John rambles, wondering how to leave, now they seem to have got into another conversation, looking around. He sees a bunch of… “Is that bamboo?”

“Huh? Oh, no. You know those spider plants, on Earth? That just grow and grow and spawn new plants and climb and grow and… This seems to be an Atlantis spider plant, but it's, uh, quite big. We've been cutting it back, I don't know what to do with this stuff I tried to palm it off on engineering but they don't want any more, and, well. I don't want to just chuck it. Might be useful,” Bobby says, shrugging.

She grabs a piece and hefts it, rambling about how strong and lightweight it is like it's a sales pitch. John takes it and nods, tries to hand it back but instead is given another bit. He ends up with an armful, stumbling a little under his load, a bit miffed how he ended up losing a team to botany expeditions, and with a bunch of sticks he has no use for. He heads for his office to pull up paperwork for Lorne to take Dr David Parish out to MK6-115. He takes the sticks with him. He turns a corner and jumps out of the way of Dr Zelenka, who moves at quite a clip when he wants to, Czech swear words streaming behind him, Rodney’s name in there somewhere. John's spider sticks go crashing and rolling away and Zelenka skids to a stop, startled. 

“Ah, major. Hello, yes. I see you have run into Dr Roberts,” Zelenka says, skittering about gathering the sticks and giving them back into John's arms. 

“What's happened? Why’re you cursing Mckay?”

“You speak Czech?” Zelenka asks, eyes lighting up. 

“No, sorry Dr Z, just spent enough time around people speaking other languages to recognise when someone's swearing at me, and I caught McKay’s name in there. What's he done?”

Not a lot, it turns out, but Zelenka wants access to jumpers and McKay is being possessive and can’t John add it to his endless endless list of things to do? John does, it’ll be easy to get McKay to agree to that - he doesn’t have time to do proper maintenance on the jumpers and it’s been annoying John anyway. He just needs to make McKay understand he’s far too important for such things. He dumps his sticks in his office and emails McKay, does the paperwork for Bobby adding MK6-115 to the roster, and suddenly he has a billion emails and Bates is there for a meeting and Ford wants to talk about taking his men for some extra training, Dr Jamison (who is that anyway?) is worried that they’ve run out of pens (barely anyone even uses them) and Halling wants… John's not sure what Halling wants. John zones out for a moment thinking about flying away out the window. His eyes rest on the sticks again. 

“Thank you, Halling, I'll definitely take your words into consideration next time I…” John trails off when he sees Halling’s lips twitching. 

“I was asking if you would like to come for lunch, Major Sheppard,” Halling says. “Perhaps you'd like to come on the hunt tomorrow also? A few days away from the city, a break.”

“Oh. Sorry about that, I got distracted. Lunch. Sure,” John says, wishing he could accept the other offer. “Halling, do you know where I can get fabric like, um, you know the tents we brought from Earth?”

Halling does know and is happy to give John a long list of other benefits that might be persuasive for roster-ing the huge floating market. It's floating in that it moves around so it basically goes on the roster for ‘whenever Halling finds the bloody thing’, for whichever team’s available at that time. 

Then they end up on the fucked up Neverland, and there's the storm and about six other disasters in quick succession. Halling comes to the balcony John's staked out (he avoids his office now, it's harder for people to ask him for things if they can't find him), but by that time half the expedition has some kind of mutant cold virus, John's been working fourteen days in a row and hasn't had a lot of sleep, and he's lost more men than he ever did in his accumulated years on earth. Maybe not quite but it feels like it and everything is wearing him down, he hasn't got a moment to stop and pray or whatever it is Halling wants. He doesn't remember the spider plants or the market or anything except the fact that they need to do a stock-take or the armoury or risk running short, AR-4 has just come back with a whole new strain of the mutant cold and Ford and Bates are both in the infirmary and they still haven’t got much intel on the wraith and one of their allies just got culled and-

“I found the Jezebel,” Halling says. 

Or, that's what John hears. He boggles at Halling, wondering who's offended him this time, remembering his grandma using that word and promising to rain down biblical fury. He hears Nancy’s voice echoing in the back of his mind somewhere as well talking about advocating for sex workers’ rights. He looks at the roster he's reworking, glances across at Luitenant Bullard who's waiting for John to do the work Bates is too sick for.

“Jezebel?” John asks, squinting at Halling. “Um, just a sec. Bullard, I know you're short just go down to two man teams, I know it's not ideal but right now I'm more worried about the city trying to kill us than running into combat situations here. Two man teams, cover as much as you can. I don't want people out on their own, if you can't cover the current patrol routes I'll cut it down more. We can restrict access to lab space if necessary.”

“Yes sir,” Bullard says, saluting. John returns it and dismisses her. She's not happy, she doesn't want to spread her men that thin and she doesn't like two man teams. She's right, but not right enough.

“The Jezeder,” Halling says, more clearly. “I think you referred to it as a floating market.”

“Oh,” John says, recalling vaguely. He rubs his forehead, head aching, pulling the notes up on his pad. “Right. They'll be trading medical knowledge, you said, and we might find weapons, something we can use for ammo… ok I'll prioritise it. Somehow.”

It takes him three hours to find a team of people who are healthy enough and not covering other shifts and have had enough sleep. Himself, one of Carson's junior docs (Ruth? Ron? Indiscriminate gender, surname Dukes. Nice shoulders), corporals Hearn and Lui who both look about twelve to John but are apparently nineteen and twenty-two. And Halling, as well. They gather in the gate room, exhausted and dispirited. John’s ready for everything to go sideways, it usually does, but in the end it’s actually a pretty smoothe op; their return eight hours later is much different. Everyone's joyful, exuberant even, lugging purchases with them. John has a whole bunch of trade agreements to file and tons of paperwork but his people are happy and that buoys him up. And Halling was right about his supplies. 

Actually, the market had more or less everything you could imagine and then some. He has decided that if Halling can keep on finding it, he’s gonna keep on putting it on the roster. He’s got his own stuff on wheels and he stands happily in the gateroom. His happiness lasts for about three seconds, at which point Dukes bends in half coughing her lungs up and Lui throws up. John jumps out the way so at least Lui throws up on his own boots only. John sighs and adds them to the sick-list, packing them both off to the infirmary. He himself has a billion things to do arising from the mission and left over from previously. He heads to his office first, though, gathering up his sticks, and lugs them and his new stuff to his room. 

He takes fifteen minutes. He changes the channel on his radio so only McKay or Elizabeth can get hold of him, takes his boots off for the first time in eleven hours, and sits down. The sitting takes precedence for a bit and he wastes three of his minutes on trying not to fall asleep. Once he’s got himself together he gets started. He did this with his grandfather, and then he got books from the library when it didn’t work so great and he got pretty good at it. He uses a protractor, compass and ruler to make everything accurate, a little bit obsessive but whatever. He starts big, because go big or go home, right? He needs a sharp craft knife, he’ll have to borrow one or trade something for one. He runs out of his fifteen minutes by the time he’s ready for that. McKay radios him as well, cutting things short, and then there’s a little bit of chaos as McKay nearly blows up half the city by accident. It probably isn’t his fault, there’s still some stuff that’s not quite working since the storm, and some stuff that should be all sealed up but isn’t, and some electrics, and oh yeah the  _ accidental bomb _ that no one  _ noticed _ . 

“Fucking fuck!” John complains, sitting on the edge of a bed in the infirmary, hands burnt and head aching. 

“Still not my fault,” McKay says, hip leaning next to John, arms crossed over his chest. His mouth’s tight and he reaches out again, taking John’s wrist and looking at the burns. “Idiot. I did say don’t touch.”

“Oh, I should’ve just let it explode, huh?” John snaps. “Ow, let me go.”

“Where is everyone?”

“Sick, looking after the sick, on P89-443 treating the kids for some kind of malaria,” John lists. 

He’s pissed about the P89-443 thing, he had to send about half a team because of the cold thing and the pissy luitenants and the even more pissy staff sargent. But Elizabeth had a point about P89-443 being about the only ally they have left right at the moment. Other than the Athosians. He needs to keep his personnel on base, but he wants his doctors safe, so now he hasn’t got his personnel on base and one corporal and a researcher who happens to be an ex-captain in the French Army are hardly top security, so his doctors aren’t safe. Jesus. He rubs his face and yelps. 

“Idiot. When was the last time you got any sleep?” McKay grumbles, tugging at John’s wrist and leaning a bit. “These don’t look too bad, I think you’ll be fine.”

“Yah, like Marie said,” John says, tugging his hand away, ignoring the other question. He rolls his eyes and has a look at his hands for himself. His head really hurts and he’s gonna be all bruises tomorrow, and his hands hurt, but he’s ok. Being flung into a wall and picking up something really really hot isn’t a great day, but it’s not the worst in Pegasus.

“Uh huh. I’m gonna find some medical people, you need to get sorted so you can sleep,” McKay says, and wanders off. 

John spends a night in the infirmary, because no one can work out if he has a headache because he hasn’t slept or because of a concussion (it’s the former. He tells everyone it’s the former). He gets another fifteen minutes a week later, and McKay got him a good craft knife as an apology for nearly blowing him up, and his hands are mostly better. 

He cuts the cloth, going slow and careful, remembering telling Nancy about this. That was way back, way way back when they were so happy, imagining all sorts of futures. She’d mentioned children and he’d been thrilled, thinking about doing this together with his potential child. Lots of things about Nance and their marriage and the whole kid thing terrified him, but those had been good moments. That fifteen minutes passes fast and his hands hurt afterwards. McKay drags him to the infirmary to get his hands rebandaged and yells at him about that for ages. He doesn’t care, he grins all day and doesn’t hate his job at all and nobody dies and it’s fantastic. They even find the Jezeder again and John’s sure it’s because of his fifteen minutes. At least everyone’s healthy again, or at least most people are; his teams are back up and running and Bates is back to organising patrols so Bullard has stopped scowling at him. 

“...and they have these things, kinda like empanadas, I have no idea what’s in them I didn’t ask, they had booze too it was blue I thought maybe next time,” John stops talking to get his breath. Ford is staring at him, Teyla looks amused, McKay looks dreamy. 

“Empanadas…” he breathes, smiling. “I love food.”

John finds a bunch of ribbons and some better glue, and he spends some time chatting to the person he bought the fabric from to get some intel on how it differs from what he’d be using on Earth. McKay tries to pry out of him what the hell he wants ribbons and glue for but John ignores him and goes to get some food. He finds some of the traders he made agreements with last time and he’s pretty sure that Atlantis has at least one more ally. No one’s told him where they’re from yet or given planet designations, but they’re happy he’s back. He also finds someone who makes knives, which is the greatest. His shopping trip cheers him up only briefly, because after that lose a ZPM to Kolya. He drinks half a bottle of what the marines call blue-rum. Not the best idea. He lays the sticks out over his fabric and does some stitching, taking a whole damned evening for himself - wonky stitching is fine, he sewed up a knife wound while barely conscious this is  _ fine _ . He lies on the floor, once he’s too drunk to do any work on his stuff. 

“Shit. Come on, major, let’s get you up,” McKay says. 

“You broke in,” John grumbles, somehow he has an arm around Rodney’s shoulder. Then he’s up. He looks around, his stuff is all put away when did he do that? At least McKay won’t know he’s building something. Making something good... “Christ you’re strong. Mm, and soft.”

“Yes, lovely, flatterer,” McKay says. “Let’s get you into bed.”

After that it’s more difficult to find time, but John manages. Here and there, snatches of time when he can focus on the glueing and stitching and creation instead of what feels like an entropic descent into destruction. Of course, the Wraith eventually arrive. He fights with Teyla, disagrees with Elizabeth, is too busy to even see McKay, and loses Aidan Ford, his bright young lieutenant. After all of that, he can’t see the point in not taking all the time he wants. He turns his radio off and drops it off a balcony, locks himself in his rooms, and finishes. He waits until it’s dark and then waits some more, and then some more, lying on his bed, holding on to the sticks and string. As the light begins to suggest morning he gets up and sneaks past the sleeping marine who he’s sure has been set to keep watch for him, camping out in the hallway there. Falling asleep on duty. Who cares, though? 

He walks, not wanting to use the transporter after the first hop across and upwards. He climbs and climbs until his legs feel a bit wobbly; he hasn’t slept in so, so long. He climbs up and up and up, onto a balcony and up some more. He finally reaches the top of one of the taller towers, high high above the ocean, and launches his kite as the sun comes up. He loosely ties on all the little pieces of paper he has, handfuls and handfuls, he wrote little notes each time he lost someone, trying to find something, anything about them. He refuses to do one for Ford; he’s alive. John lets the kite go, lets the wind catch it, catch his tatters of paper, spools out the thread until it’s high, high, high against the blue-ing sky. 


End file.
